Cassette Tape to CD or Mp3 – Audio Cassette to CD or Mp3 – Audio Tapes to CD, Mp3, USB or hard drive
At Procopy we often see the many formats of audio tape that have been developed over the years and many of these need transferring to CD or other formats before they deteriorate and becoming un-playable in the future. The Audio Cassette developed by Philips in the 60’s was truly one of the most popular consumer recording formats of all time. It was one of the first mediums to give the consumer freedom to make their own recordings documenting, music, family oral histories, birthdays, weddings and funerals aswell as medical reports and other personal moments.
Audio tape formats including the Standard audio cassette, Microcassettes, Mini Cassettes, initial were used for purely dictation purposes. The less common but arguably better quality 8-track Cartridges were also a popular medium in cars and muzak type systems for continual music programme playback. (restaurants, elevators, - “Lifts” in the UK and Australia and store or even airplane audio playback systems). Considerable work by Dolby technologies in the area of noise reduction enabled the humble audio cassette to become a commercial music format for many years, (Audio cassettes beginning their decline around the end of the 1990’s). ProCopy produced many hundreds of thousands of high quality audio cassettes in conjunction with our Real-Time KABA R&D cassette recorders from our start in 1988 up until 2006.
It’s therefore natural now that many of these audio cassette recordings cannot be played back simply because of the advances in audio technology and that people have replaced their old equipment with newer technology. Audio cassette degradation and the initial quality of the source recordings often means that these audio tapes are quite poor quality compared to today’s audio standards.
In many cases at ProCopy we can transfer the audio cassettes to CD and process them to improve the quality of the finished audio. The main limitation to improving the quality is the time taken to improve the audio depending on how fussy we want to be.
We would always recommend making the highest quality transfer practical (Such as Audio CD 16-Bit @ 44.1KHz) or Archive quality 24-Bit @ 48KHz or higher to start with, whether or not that is the final format needed.
It is a simple process then to convert the audio to an Mp3 for web use, portable player or computer. By doing this it means that you can go back to the high quality master and work on it when technology has improved further in years to come or you can make further listening copies if one gets damaged. It’s a good idea to keep the original master filed away and use safety copies for day to day listening.
If you have a collection of old audio cassettes or microcassettes that need transferring before its too late, call us and we’ll assess the recordings for you and give you a timeframe for the transfer work. More information on other audio tape formats and our noise reduction techniques can be found here.
* for explanations of these and other audio terms, see our ProCopy Audio Glossary.